SHAMBHALA SUN NOVEMBER 2012
42
I put it down to the dharma. Sonnenhof, a center for
Zen and contemplation in the Black Forest of Germany,
was founded by my own teacher, Joan Rieck Roshi. Obvi-
ously, I had a karmic connection to it. In some ways the
center itself has evolved over some twenty-two years to
be an expression of her teaching, which is the teaching of
Yasutani Roshi and Yamada Roshi that I have also received.
This building has developed as a receptacle and conveyor
of that teaching: small wonder that it should feel so famil-
iar, so welcoming, and so much like home.
Yet dharma was not the whole answer. There was more.
I
AM A BRITISH JEW. Throughout my childhood I
absorbed, explicitly and subliminally, so much anti-
German sentiment that by the time I reached adult-
hood, curious though I was about other European coun-
tries, I had no interest in Germany. I’d taken one compul-
sory overnight visit to the country as a child, while touring
with a school choir, and a two-hour trip into Freiburg
from France as a youth, where the drive down a tree-lined
autobahn reminded me chillingly of a highway I’d once
seen in a Nazi propaganda film. Soon after, I made a silent
promise not to visit Germany again. It was too hard. My
father’s extended family had all come from Poland and
Ukraine. They were erased from history during the Second
World War. The past was too awful, the sins too great. The
history was simply too painful. It was easier to have noth-
ing to do with the place.
I stuck to my promise. In my mid-twenties I even gave
up a well-funded Ph.D. on Homer when it became clear I
was going to have to learn German to read all that coun-
try’s great classical scholarship. I developed my own pri-
vate embargo not just against Germany but all things Ger-
man. And somehow, I never really questioned the right-
ness of this attitude. It seemed inherently, inviolably right,
and I found plenty of encouragement among my Jewish
and English friends.
I was brought up on the Second World War. It was the
great mythology on which we were reared in England. In
my case, it was a dual history: on the one side, the heroic
British commandos giving sadistic Gestapo agents what
for with their Tommy guns; and on the other, the Holo-
caust, the hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of pale
bodies bulldozed into the black Polish mud or inciner-
ated into its low skies. Among them, somewhere, were the
unnumbered members of my father’s family. But we didn’t
talk about them.
Once when I asked my father why we had lost no family
in the war, he shrugged and said, “What are you talking
about, boychick? My mum, my dad, they both had scores
of relatives in Poland.”
He’d never mentioned them before. All I could think to
say was: “What happened to them?”
Which only elicited another shrug. “What do you think?
You never heard of Hitler?”
I was shocked. And I picked up the sense that the whole
subject was more or less like Germany itself: Don’t go there.
Nor did our losses end with those distant relatives. Not
content with slaughtering all the lost uncles, aunts, and
cousins, the Germans had also landed a V-2 rocket right
on the roof of my grandfather’s tailoring workshop in
Soho, central London, after which he was never again able
to own his own workshop.
To hate Germany may have been a prejudice, but it was
a fine one, even a laudable one. It was right to cauterize the
immense wound Germany had caused, to cut it away, to
exclude it from our world. Our world would continue to
turn. It just wouldn’t have Germany in it.
Y
ET IT DID HAVE GERMANY in it. It does. The
Holocaust happened, and here we are now, nearly
seventy years on, and Germany is still in our world.
And here I was now, on German soil. Somehow, in spite
of all my best resolutions, I was not just in Germany but in
Schwarzwald, Germany’s heartland. And not just that, but
about to help lead a Zen retreat for nearly fifty German
students. How had this happened? What was I doing here?
The strongest convictions are apt to melt in the course
of Zen training. That may be in large part what the train-
ing is for. But my conviction that Germany had forever
forsaken its right to a place in my world had apparently
not melted. Or had it? Here I was, after all.
When my teacher asked me to join her in leading this
retreat, I unhesitatingly said yes. If possible, I always tried to
do what she asked. She is an extraordinarily modest and
clear teacher. In spite of having guided hundreds of stu-
dents along the Zen path, she is all but unknown, except
to her students. To know her you have to find her. Your
HENRY SHUKMAN is a Zen teacher in the Sanbo Kyodan
lineage. His latest novel, The Lost City, was a New York Times
editors’ choice.